Ixeos: Book One of the Ixeos Trilogy

by Jennings Wright

  Clay swung the duffel bag over his shoulder and pulled out a flashlight. “This is all I’ve got.”

  “It’ll have to do. Marty, stay behind us. Clay, stay beside me. Don’t turn on a light unless I say so.” Vasco quietly turned the door handle and slid into the darkness within.

  The three stood inside the doorway, straining to hear anything unusual in the expansive hall. The monotonous sound of the drizzling rain drowned out any other sound. Vasco waved them forward, pointing to the wet footprints on the marble floor. Looking behind them, Marty saw that they were leaving their own puddles, a perfect trail for anyone else to follow.

  They crept down the side gallery of the Opera House, not noticing the opulence and beauty. As they went further from the front lobby, it became almost too dark to see. Only Vasco’s knowledge of the place kept them moving forward without running into the statuary. Once again, he held up a hand They all heard it: the quiet squeak of a hinge, then low talking.

  Recognizing one of the voices Vasco called out, “Aaron?”

  “Bobby?” came the answer back.

  “It’s Abacus,” Vasco said to the boys, adjusting his pack and heading towards the back of the Opera House. “He must have Hannah and Rod with him.”

  Clay raised an eyebrow to Marty. “Rod?”

  The group was silent as they left the Opera House by the vast underground reservoir and made their way back to the living quarters. After quick introductions between Rod and the McClellands, Vasco and Abacus made sure that Rod was between them and away from the others as they all walked single file towards home. Hannah kept her hands in her pockets and her head down. Bemused, the boys followed along, Clay holding a torch aloft and letting his mind wander to the code.

  When they reached the living room, the three older men walked straight through and into the office, not speaking to anyone. Hannah found Neahle reading a book on a long sofa and sat down to join her, peeling off her wet sweatshirt. Clay and Marty, after quickly greeting Neahle, went to the library with the heavy duffle bag and closed the door.

  “So, I guess that was Rod?” Neahle asked, looking down the empty hallway where the office and library were.

  “Yeah,” Hannah said, sliding down on the couch so her head was on the back cushion and her legs were stretched out in front of her. Her hands were still scrunched down in her pockets.

  “And?” Neahle prompted.

  Hannah shrugged. “He agreed. They’re going to get him some clothes, let him eat dinner in the office, and then they’re taking him off somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Abacus didn’t say. No one is supposed to know until it’s all worked out with Landon. It’s not like I’m going to run away with him or something!” Hannah slumped even farther down on the cushions, her backside now over the edge and her arms crossed over her chest.

  “They know that. And he passed the first test, right? Agreeing to go?” Neahle looked at Hannah’s scowl and smiled. “Come on now, you knew it would be this way. You knew he’d have to earn back trust.”

  “I know,” Hannah muttered.

  “So… What’s the deal?” Neahle turned sideways so she could face her friend.

  Hannah stared off across the room for a long moment, then turned to Neahle. “He cried.”

  “What?”

  “He cried. Rod Hewitt cried. When Abacus offered him the deal… He couldn’t even speak.”

  “Wow. It must have been bad out there,” Neahle said, leaning over her crossed legs.

  “It was terrible. He told us some of it but I’m sure there’s a lot more he didn’t say. He always had a lot of pride; I think he stayed so long because of it.” Hannah sat up some and tried to push her wet hair back into a ponytail.

  “What do you mean?” Neahle asked.

  “Well, for one thing, he didn’t want to admit he’d made a mistake. Even when things were really bad, I think he’d rather take it than have to come back here and apologize. Leastwise, for awhile. It looks like that’s broken now. If he can come out the other side and fight with us…” She trailed off.

  “You’d want him back,” Neahle finished.

  Hannah smiled ruefully. “Yeah, I’d want him back.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Neahle found her brother in the library at midnight, his hair sticking up in wild spikes and bags under his eyes. The black eye he’d gotten in London was a faded yellow. Marty was curled up in the corner asleep with his head on his back pack. Wads of crumpled paper littered the floor and table and several broken pencils were scattered around the room.

  “So, what’s up?” she said, taking in the disarray.

  “I’m trying to crack the code,” Clay said, flopping back in the chair and shoving his pencil behind his ear.

  “Right. The first code or the second code?” She hadn’t had a chance to speak to Clay and Marty since they returned. Will had brought their meals into the library and they’d spent all their time hidden behind the closed door.

  “The second, if my theory’s right. That’s a big if.” He gestured to the papers and scribbles in front of him. “If they use the Enigma machine first and then code it… Well, I guess we could eventually figure that out, but that would mean running every single option through the machine and seeing what comes out. With all three of us working all day every day, it could take years.”

  “Where’s the message?” Neahle asked, digging through the papers on the table. Clay handed it to her and she studied it.

  “I got nothing,” she finally said. She put the paper down and wound her blonde hair into a bun, poking a pencil through to hold it in place.

  “Join the club. I’ve been trying all kinds of codes. A substitution code seemed liked the most likely, but I’ve tried every combination and it doesn’t work. If they used a route cipher or a columnar transposition, I’m not going to be able to do it—those use grids and you have to know how many rows and columns are being used. The options are endless. I tried a few simple ones, but they didn’t work. There are more elaborate ones, which first, I wouldn’t be able to figure out, and second, just seem too elaborate for the Firsts to use. It doesn’t fit their personality.”

  “Lockwell might not be like the others,” Neahle pointed out.

  “I think they’re all alike,” Clay said. “They have no personalities, from what everybody says. They have no creativity. They’re logical, they don’t feel anything…” He shook his head in frustration. “I think he’d use something easier, simpler.”

  “So the substitution is where you substitute… What?”

  “Well, the easiest ones are where you move the alphabet over a set number of spaces. Let’s say you move it over five spaces, and wrap the last five letters around to the beginning.” He found a sheet of paper with blank space and started to write it out. “Under that, you write the alphabet normally.”

  V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  “Then you just use this key to substitute for your code. So if our message is ‘I love you,’ then we take the letter on top of each letter in the message in the key and write it: D GJQZ TJP.”

  “Cool!” Neahle said, staring at the letters. “But that’s not what they did?”

  “No, I’ve tried it with every possible sequence of wrapped letters.”

  Neahle stared at it awhile, then threw the paper down in disgust. She’d never been good at puzzles. “The Firsts are so, so arrogant,” she said. “Everything’s about them! I hate them, and I hate what they’ve made this world.” She got up and stomped out of the library, slamming the door behind her.

  Neahle was surprised to see both her brother and Marty at breakfast the next morning looking triumphant. She brought her bowl of oatmeal over
and sat down, scowling at them.

  “Why are you so happy?” she asked. She’d barely slept herself, her brain unable to let the puzzle go.

  “We did it!” Marty said grinning.

  Neahle perked up. “You cracked the code?”

  Her brother gave her a fist bump across the table. “All thanks to you, sis.”

  “Me?” Neahle sipped her tea, confused.

  “You. Your little tantrum did it. I hadn’t thought of keyword ciphers before. To tell you the truth, if I had thought of them, I don’t know if I would’ve tried. The keyword can be any word at all, or even just a sequence of letters…”

  “Hold up,” Neahle interrupted. “You’ve lost me already.”

  Clay laughed and pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “Okay, in a keyword cipher, you choose a word that doesn’t have repeating letters. That’s the keyword. Then you put the keyword in front of the alphabet, take out the letters that are in the keyword, and divide the alphabet in half. You put the second half underneath the first half, and then you do what we did with that substitution cipher. You find your letter and take the letter above or below it for your coded message.” At her frown, he started to write. After a moment, he turned the paper towards her.

  F I R S T A B C D E G H J

  K L M N O P Q U V W X Y Z

  “See? The keyword is ‘first.’” He grinned. “I thought of it after you slammed the door. You’re right, they’re arrogant and it is all about them and their plans for this planet. So I tried ‘first’ as the keyword and it worked! It deciphered the message!”

  Neahle was speechless for a long moment. “What does it say?”

  “It says, ‘Unit zed moves to NAP, HOU, ORL, COL. Usual prep confirm.’ In code a Y is usually used for a comma and an X a period, so that’s what we’ve assumed is happening here.” Clay looked like the cat that ate the canary.

  “And what that means is that the prison was going to Naples, Houston, Orlando, then Columbus, Ohio,” Marty translated. “We got ‘em!”

  “Where’s the prison now?” Abacus asked Marty. The McClellands were seated in the office with Abacus, Vasco, Monkey, Hannah and Riley.

  Marty answered. “It’s in Houston and it should be moving this weekend to Orlando if we’ve interpreted the message right. We already know it was in Naples, Italy, last week; we had a report from the ground.”

  Vasco looked thoughtfully at Abacus. “We can’t get organized by next week, and the tunnels in Orlando are sketchy. They were only built in the sixties and seventies at Disney World. They’re not as reliable as I’d want for an op like this—I want to be able to get out fast. Our Orlando rebel network isn’t that big, either. And we don’t have a way to get to Columbus.”

  “I agree,” Abacus said. “Now that we can decipher the messages quickly, I think we can pick our spot. Marty, how far in advance of the prison moving to Naples was this message sent to LRTD?”

  “Looks like about two weeks,” Marty said.

  “Which would mean the next four locations will be transmitted any day now, right?” Monkey asked.

  “Yeah, if that’s a regular pattern. We’ve only got this one to go by.” Marty looked down at the message. “If the prison is moved on Sundays and they start planning two Fridays before, then that means a new message will go tonight or tomorrow. I need to get back to the vault.”

  Abacus nodded but motioned for him to stay seated. “Monkey will take you back. Hannah can go with you. I don’t want any less than two-man teams from now on.” He looked pointedly at Hannah who nodded and dropped her eyes. “We need to figure out our communications issues sooner rather than later. These emails give us a short window already—we can’t take a week to transfer the information.”

  Clay pointed to his cousin who sat forward in his chair. “Sorry, forgot to bring this up with the code and all. I think I can solve it, at least in the short term. We may need to try to lay cable at some point, but if we’re going to blow the comm center, that’ll be a problem—we’d have to bring it from La Defense, and that’s a heck of a long way. For now, I think we can use the comm center to our advantage…” He went on to explain his idea about cloning cell phones.

  Vasco was the first to give a hearty endorsement. “Obviously there are risks, but everything we do here has risks. There are hundreds of places the tunnels go up top that are in the middle of nowhere now. If we turn the phones on, check for a text or voice message, and make a quick call, we should be able to do all that in less than three minutes, before any kind of GPS tracking is activated. And the GPS won’t work in the tunnels anyway.”

  “I can disable the GPS in older phones,” Marty said. “Not smart phones, at least not reliably, but in an older style phone. And no, it wouldn’t work in the tunnels, even if the phones had active GPS. As long as you’re fast, they’ll never find you. I’m more worried about us, since we’re stationary in the vault. But inside that vault, GPS won’t work either. The main question is, can you find phones?”

  Vasco smiled. “Oh, yeah.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Vasco led Marty down a hallway, making several turns before pushing back a curtain and entering a large room carved from the rock. Holding up a flashlight, Marty gaped at what he saw. The room was lined with shelves; all sorts of electronics were stacked on them. Everything from clock radios to iPods to back-up batteries to flat screen televisions sat covered with clear plastic sheeting on dozens of shelves.

  “What’s all this?” Marty said, walking down a row and seeing boxes of landline phones, cell phones, short wave radios and walkie-talkies.

  “It’s our own personal Radio Shack,” Vasco said. At Marty’s confusion, he laughed. “When Aaron and I first got here, we didn’t really understand how things were, the permanent damage the EMPs had done. We’d find these kinds of things in Paris or farther afield as we explored the portals and we’d bring them back. We thought we’d use them one day. Well, we thought a lot of things back then that turned out not to be true, like having power some day. We quit doing it a long time ago, of course, but we still have all the stuff. Pick out whatever you need. I’m hoping that, since the batteries weren’t in the phones at the time of the EMPs, they’ll still work.”

  Marty stood in front of a section of shelving that contained hundreds of cell phones. There were basic, call-only, large-button flip phones, sleek Motorola Razrs, iPhones and Android phones and military issue phones. In a cardboard box next to the phones were dozens of chargers. Picking them up and looking at them one by one, he selected four Samsung Gravity phones with qwerty keyboards. Digging through the box, he found chargers for them.

  “I know we can charge at the vault; we’ve got power. What about you?”

  “We’ve got a couple of generators. We don’t use them much anymore, we’ve kind of figured out the no-power thing and it’s easier not having to worry about fuel. But we can run them enough to keep the inverters charged. Those will store enough power to charge a couple of phones for a good while.”

  “I’ll have to take them all to the vault while I dig through the records from the comm center and come up with the numbers. I’ll do two phones for each number, just in case something happens to one. I’ll get them set up and disable the GPS, then Monkey and I can test them and come up with a call schedule. He can bring it all back with him. Does that work?”

  “Perfect,” Vasco said, clapping Marty on the shoulder.

  “I’ll check for any emails from Verestyuk tonight, just in case. You really think we can finally find the prison and get Darian out?” Marty tucked the phones up against his body and threw the charger cables over his shoulder.

  “We’ll have to wait for the best location since we don’t have tunnels in all the locations that the prison goes to. Or coordinated rebel cells. But when it gets to the right one, we’ll empty out these
tunnels, we’ll get the rebels mobilized, and yes, I think we can get him out.”

  Every time he crossed the bridge to Ile St. Luis, Marty chalked it up as a success if he didn’t have to dive off. He thought that, even if they ran into a gang or a carload of Firsts, he’d still be happy as long as he didn’t have to throw himself into the Seine. This time, as with his other crossings, there was no welcoming committee, just deserted streets.

  As soon as he was in the vault, he sat down at his computer and started searching for new messages from Alexandra Verestyuk and the anonymous source at the LRTD. Nothing had come through so far. He switched over to the comm center records. He had stored the last six months worth in a folder on his desktop, so he opened it and started looking. Electronically crossing off numbers, in two hours he was left with seven that had only been used three times or less in the previous half year.

  Marissa had welcomed him back and periodically tried to start a conversation, only to be met with a “wait a sec” upraised index finger. Amused, she went back to work.

  “Got it,” Marty said, rolling back in his executive chair and grinning.

  “Got what?” Marissa said.

  “I’ve got phone numbers we can use to communicate with the tunnels, and a message from Madame Verestyuk just went out to our friend at the LRTD.”

  “Seriously? Did you guys crack the code?” Marissa leaned around the corner to see his screen.

  Marty held up a piece of paper. “We sure did! And with any luck, this isn’t a recipe for borscht.” He got up and went to the kitchen, clutching his phone records and the print-out of the email.